Tobas shrugged. “Pretty safe. Karanissa’s walked that route a few times before; she knows the way.” He glowered at the Seething Death again. “I suppose we might as well keep trying things until they get here, though. And what we’re going to do if the Black Dagger doesn ’t work...”
He never finished his sentence.
CHAPTER 42
Whoever occupied the house on the comer of Grand Street and Wizard Street now was more careful than old Serem had ever been; Tabaea had found every door locked, front, back, or side-alley, with warding spells protecting them. The Black Dagger could have cut through the wards as if they weren’t there, but the Black Dagger was gone.
Whoever the wizard was who had placed the wards had been more careful than Serem, but he hadn’t been ridiculous about it. He hadn’t put wards on the roof. The idea that somebody might climb up on the roof and pry the tiles up with her bare fingers, one by one so they wouldn’t clatter, in the middle of the night so she wouldn’t be seen—well, no one had worried about anything as unlikely as that.
Even with a cat’s eyesight and the strength of a dozen men, the job took hours. The sky was pale pink in the east by the time Tabaea lowered herself, slowly and carefully, through the hole into the attic.
She didn’t know who lived here, or what the house had become, but she had seen the magicians going in and out, the messengers hurrying to and from the front door, and she knew that this place was somehow important. She guessed that her enemies had made it their headquarters.
Why they weren’t operating out of the palace, now that she was gone, she wasn’t quite sure. Maybe they were waiting until me overlord came back—one of the messengers had said his ship was on the way; Tabaea had heard it quite clearly from her place on the rooftop.
The city guard was back, even if the overlord wasn’t; from atop the house Tabaea could see the uniforms in Grandgate Market, the formations of men marching back and forth as they resumed their duties and “restored order.” Much as she hated to admit it, the sight was somehow comforting.
Less comforting was the knowledge that the guard was clearing out the palace, room by room and corridor by corridor, but oddly, even the processions of the homeless finding their way back to the Wall Street Field were almost reassuring; Tabaea was relieved that her people weren’t being sent to the dungeons, or slaughtered. Everything was to be returned to what it had been before, it seemed.
Everything, that is, except herself. There was no way they could turn her back to the harmless little thief she had once been. They would have to kill her—if they could.
And it seemed to her that the best chance of making sure that they couldn’t would be to find out just what the wizards had planned. And since the wizards seemed to hold their meetings here, in Serem’s house...
Well, that was why she was standing on the bare, dusty planks of the attic floor, peering through the dimness, looking for the trapdoor that would let her down into the house itself.
She found it at last, over in a corner, and lifted it with excruciating slowness, in case anyone was in the room below. The trap was larger than she had expected, and when raised it revealed not a ladder, or an empty space where a ladder might be placed, but a steep, narrow staircase with a closed door at the bottom.
She crept down, and slipped through, and she was in the wizards’ house, able to spy on all that went on.
Except that nothing was going on; everyone in the place—and there were several people there—was asleep, or nearly so; from the central hallway of the second floor Tabaea could look down the stairs and see that one woman sat by the front door, presumably standing watch, but even this guard in fact dozed off and on.
None of the people were witches, which was a relief; a witch, or possibly even a warlock, might have been able to detect her presence, no matter how quiet she was. Wizards, though, needed their spells to do anything like that.
Of course, even a witch wouldn’t spot her when the witch was asleep, and everybody here was asleep.
This was hardly surprising, with the sun not yet above the horizon; after some thought, Tabaea crept back to the attic, closed the door carefully, then curled up on the plank floor for a catnap.
She awoke suddenly, as cats do, aware that she had slept longer than she had intended to; quickly and quietly, she slipped back downstairs.
A meeting was going on hi the front parlor; she crept down the hall and stood by the door, out of sight, listening.
“...at least sixty feet across now,” a man’s voice said. “It’s taken out a section of the back wall and rear stairway, while mostly maintaining its hemispherical shape. It seems to send appendages up the walls, breaking off chunks and pulling them down into the main mass. On the stairs, the upper edge sags somewhat, rounding itself off, now that it’s above the level of the step it’s dissolving. It’s penetrated the floor of the meeting room below the Great Hall and worked deep into the storeroom below; in a few hours, at most, it should pierce that floor, as well, and begin dripping into the dungeons. The Greater Spell of Transmutation, generally considered to be a tenth-order spell, has had no effect, any more than any of the earlier attempts at finding a countercharm. The Spell of Cleansing, third-order but requiring extensive preparation, should be complete soon. Llarimuir’s Vaporization is in progress, but requires twenty-four hours of ritual, so we won’t know the results until late tonight.”
A dismayed silence followed this report; Tabaea tried to figure out what it was all about. A meeting room below a great hall? That sounded like the palace. Something was dissolving things in the palace?
Then she blinked, astonished. They were discussing the Seething Death! “... earlier attempts at finding a counter-charm...” They didn’t know how to stop their own spell!
And Lady Sarai had laughed at her! As if prompted by her thought, someone asked, “Is there any word from Lady Sarai?”
“Not yet,” a man replied, “but she and Karanissa should reach Dwomor Keep late this evening or early tomorrow, if all goes well, and they can be here within an hour after that. The tapestry we gave Tobas comes out in an unused room in one of the Grandgate towers; we have a guard posted there, ready to escort them here the moment they appear.”
“That assumes, of course,” someone said, with heavy sarcasm, “that they’re coming back at all, that it isn’t raining or snowing, that they haven’t been waylaid by bandits or eaten by a dragon, that they haven’t gotten lost in the mountains, that Lady Sarai didn’t panic and kill Karanissa the moment she appeared, that someone at Dwomor Keep hasn’t inadvertently ruined the tapestry there...” Tabaea recognized the speaker as the one who had reported on the Seething Death.
“Oh, shut up, Heremon,” a different voice said, speaking with weary annoyance. “Karanissa is fine; she spun a coin the day we arrived in Ethshar, and it’s still spuming, without the slightest slowing or wobbling. I checked less than an hour ago.” “That doesn’t prove she isn’t holed up somewhere waiting out a blizzard, or warding off wolves,” Heremon argued.
“There are no wolves in Dwomor,” the tired voice said. “And for that matter, even in the mountains, it doesn’t snow in Harvest.” “Still...”
“Yes, they might be delayed,” the tired voice agreed. “We just have to hope that they aren’t.” He sighed. “The overlord’s ship is due tomorrow afternoon, I understand. It would be nice if we could present him with a palace, even a damaged one, that’s safe to enter and not in danger of being reduced to bubbling slime.” Someone answered that, but Tabaea was no longer listening; she was thinking.
Lady Sarai would be returning soon, to one of the towers in Grandgate—and she would have the Black Dagger with her, surely; that was why all these wizards were so eager for her return. Tabaea had figured it out; the Black Dagger was the countercharm for the Seething Death! And when Sarai had carried it off to wherever that magic tapestry went, apparently some place called Dwomor, that had left them unable to stop the Death from spreading.
If Tabaea could get to Sarai before the magicians did, she could take back the Black Dagger. Then she could stop the Seething Death, renounce her abdication, and resume her rule. Old Ederd was coming back, too—she could catch him and kill him and put an end to attempts to restore him to the throne. Stopping the Death would
